“No one, Your Excellency.”

“Eh?”

“No one, Your Excellency.”

“Very well, run along. . . .”

Swaying majestically, he made for the lemonade stall, where sat a full-bosomed old Jewess, who gave herself out to be a Georgian, and said to her as loudly as though he were giving the word of command to a regiment: 

“Be so good as to give me some soda-water!”

II

Laevsky’s not loving Nadyezhda Fyodorovna showed itself chiefly in the fact that everything she said or did seemed to him a lie, or equivalent to a lie, and everything he read against women and love seemed to him to apply perfectly to himself, to Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband.  When he returned home, she was sitting at the window, dressed and with her hair done, and with a preoccupied face was drinking coffee and turning over the leaves of a fat magazine; and he thought the drinking of coffee was not such a remarkable event that she need put on a preoccupied expression over it, and that she had been wasting her time doing her hair in a fashionable style, as there was no one here to attract and no need to be attractive.  And in the magazine he saw nothing but falsity.  He thought she had dressed and done her hair so as to look handsomer, and was reading in order to seem clever.

“Will it be all right for me to go to bathe to-day?” she said.

“Why?  There won’t be an earthquake whether you go or not, I suppose . . . .”

“No, I only ask in case the doctor should be vexed.”

“Well, ask the doctor, then; I’m not a doctor.”

On this occasion what displeased Laevsky most in Nadyezhda Fyodorovna was her white open neck and the little curls at the back of her head.  And he remembered that when Anna Karenin got tired of her husband, what she disliked most of all was his ears, and thought:  “How true it is, how true!”

Feeling weak and as though his head were perfectly empty, he went into his study, lay down on his sofa, and covered his face with a handkerchief that he might not be bothered by the flies.  Despondent and oppressive thoughts always about the same thing trailed slowly across his brain like a long string of waggons on a gloomy autumn evening, and he sank into a state of drowsy oppression.  It seemed to him that he had wronged Nadyezhda Fyodorovna and her husband, and that it was through his fault that her husband had died.  It seemed to him that he had sinned against his own life, which he had ruined, against the world of lofty ideas, of learning, and of work, and he conceived that wonderful world as real and possible, not on this sea-front with hungry Turks and lazy mountaineers sauntering upon it, but there in the North, where there were operas, theatres, newspapers, and all kinds of intellectual activity.  One could only there—­not here—­be honest, intelligent, lofty, and pure.  He accused himself of having no ideal,